Gingrich versus the Palestinian Authority

"The American congressional candidates were correct in criticizing the PA for promoting terror."

US presidential candidate and the former speaker of US House of Representatives
Newt Gingrich said this week that the Palestinian Authority does not recognize
Israel’s right to exist and that Palestinian schoolbooks teach children to
become terrorists. Gingrich cited what he said were PA sources to back up his
remarks.

However, the PA has rejected his statements as
“groundless.”

According to the British daily The Guardian: “Palestinian
officials said Gingrich’s allegations were based substantially on material
produced by an Israeli organization, Palestinian Media Watch, which has
published a long list of entries on its website (palwatch.org) under the heading
‘Promoting Violence for Children.’ An article from 2007 describes Palestinian
textbooks paid for with US aid money that deny Israel’s right to
exist.

“But Xavier Abu Eid, a senior adviser to the Palestine Liberation
Organization, said the website and Gingrich’s allegations were
groundless.” (December 11, 2011)

Certainly the PA’s rejection of the US
candidate was expected, as his charges contradict what the PA has been telling
Western countries for years.

This is not merely an irrelevant distraction
and rhetoric of a presidential campaign. It is these issues – PA nonrecognition
of Israel and its support of terror – that are at the heart of the peace process
and constitute a major impediment to its success. Therefore, it is
critical to determine who is correct – Gingrich or the PA.

What exactly
was said about the PA?

During the ABC News Republican presidential candidates’
debate (December 10, 2011), Gingrich said that the PA does not recognize
Israel’s right to exist. He said that “the Palestinian Authority ambassador to
India said last month, ‘There is no difference between Fatah and Hamas. We both
agree Israel has no right to exist.” This quote, taken from a PMW bulletin, is
precise and is very significant, elaborating one of the most important and yet
relatively unnoticed principles of PA ideology.

The PA Ambassador to
India, Adli Sadeq, wrote in the official PA daily: “They [Israelis] have a
common mistake or misconception by which they fool themselves, assuming that
Fatah accepts them and recognizes the right of their state to exist, and that it
is Hamas alone that loathes them and does not recognize the right of this state
to exist. They ignore the fact that this state, based on a fabricated [Zionist]
enterprise, never had any shred of a right to exist.” (Al- Hayat Al-Jadida
November 26, 2011)

The point of the PA ambassador was the following: The PA
differentiates between recognizing that Israel in fact exists – and its
unwavering denial of Israel’s legitimacy, that is, Israel’s right to
exist. The PA educates its children with this dual message that Israel
exists but has no right to exist, as expressed in a PA schoolbook for grade 12:
“Palestine’s war ended with a catastrophe that is unprecedented in history, when
the Zionist gangs stole Palestine and established the State of Israel.” (Arabic
Language, Analysis, Literature and Criticism, grade 12, p. 104)

Defining Israel
as being created after “Zionist gangs stole Palestine” is the definitive
expression of denying Israel’s right to exist. Significantly, this rejection of
Israel is not just found in Palestinian schoolbooks but is a central part of the
ongoing Palestinian discourse.

When a fire raged in northern Israel last
year and the PA sent a team of firefighters to join international forces trying
to put it out, it was justified by a regular columnist in the official PA daily
as follows: “Even if an aggressive foreigner occupies our home and steals it, we
don’t wish for the home to burn.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 5, 2010)

Even
the official PA daily, when reporting on sporting events, uses political
language that tells its readers that it rejects the legitimacy of Israel. The
official PA daily reported on a ceremony honoring an Israeli Arab soccer team
and its success in moving up to Israel’s top division Premier League. Yet when
the story was reported in the PA daily it was described as “the team’s rise to
the national league in the homeland occupied in 1948.” (Al- Hayat Al-Jadida,
June 18, 2010)

It did not report that it was the “national league in
Israel.”

In the article in the official PA daily that Gingrich quoted,
the PA ambassador to India explained this central duality of the PA ideology,
whereby they recognize Israel’s existence as a fact of history, but reject
Israel’s right to exist, as does Hamas.

In a different part of the
article the PA ambassador explained this explicitly: “There are no two
Palestinians who disagree over the fact that Israel exists, and recognition of
it is restating the obvious. But recognition of its right to exist is something
else, different from recognition of its [physical] existence.” (Al-Hayat
Al-Jadida, November 26, 2011) Clearly, Gingrich was correct.

Similarly,
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas himself has promoted this dual message. In his
speech at the UN asking for recognition of Palestine as an independent state,
Abbas stated to the international community: “Let us build the bridges of
dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation, and build cooperative
relations based on parity and equity between two neighboring states – Palestine
and Israel.” (Speech at the UN, September 23, 2011)

However, on the very
next day, Abbas’s own government- controlled PA TV as part of its UN statehood
campaign broadcast a map that included PA areas as well as all of Israel,
wrapped in the Palestinian flag, symbolizing Palestinian political sovereignty
over all of Israel. This visual statement was another blatant denial of Israel’s
legitimacy.

Newt Gingrich’s second critique of the PA, which presidential
candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann likewise mentioned in the ABC debate, was
of the PA schoolbooks which he said teach children to be terrorists. Gingrich
said: “These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They
have textbooks that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how
many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid
money.”

Here, Gingrich was correct in principle but his example was not.
The PA schoolbooks do not include that particular math question. Instead the PA
Ministry of Education does something far worse: It glorifies murderers and
terrorists. The PA Ministry of Education has two of its schools named
after Dalal Mughrabi (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 23, 2006), the woman who led
the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history, the Coastal Road massacre bus
hijacking in which 37 civilians were killed.

What exactly is the PA
message to its children regarding terror? When the Ministry of Education makes
children study in a school that venerates a terrorist who killed 37 civilians,
its message is very clear: Terror and killing Israelis is not only justified but
is even worthy of honor.

Fatah has a women’s club at Palestinian
universities called Sisters of Dalal, honoring the same terrorist Mughrabi. Two
summer camps for children this past summer had groups named after her, and one
of the camps was sponsored by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. The entire
environment the PA has created for its children envelopes them in glorification
of terror.

The PA, it seems, learned that the world would no longer
permit it to directly call to kill Israelis, for to do so would cause it to lose
American and European funding. So instead of promoting the terror, it glorifies
the terrorists; instead of Palestinian children learning that they must kill
Israelis, they learn that whoever kills Israelis will become a Palestinian
hero.

When the American congressional candidates criticized the PA for
promoting terror among Palestinians they were absolutely correct. When
they accused the PA of denying Israel’s right to exist they were merely exposing
authentic PA ideology.

The time is approaching for the PA to make some
hard choices. Is it going to change and take the path of peace or is it going to
continue on the path of deception?